With crude oil shipments from North Dakota poised to turn into a gusher at the Port of Albany and down the Hudson River, the U.S. Coast Guard and state Environmental Conservation Department are confident existing plans address the threat of an oil spill on the river.

Two oil companies — one in the port and another at a nearby private terminal — are ramping up planned rail shipments of shale crude from the booming Bakken fields.

Between Houston-based Buckeye Partners and Global Partners, located in Waltham, Mass., up to 395,000 barrels of oil a day could come into Albany on rail cars, and then move 150 miles down the river on tankers and barges to the Atlantic.

That is nearly 16.6 million gallons of oil a day, nearly half the potential output of a massive field thousands of miles away that is estimated to hold more than two billion barrels of oil, or even more, making it one of the largest oil reserves in the country. Locked in shale rock formations, the oil became reachable only after new rock-fracturing drilling technology was developed in 2008.

Crude oil coming into Albany and moving down the Hudson would be a first, said Richard Hendrick, general manager of the Albany Port District Commission. "I am not aware that a drop of crude was ever shipped out of the port until the Bakken oil showed up this year," he said.

He said Buckeye's first oil trains are scheduled to arrive at the port on Thursday to pump into the company's tank farm, and the company's first loaded oil tanker should depart on Nov. 15, bound for a Canadian oil refinery in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Global's oil trains and barges are already running.

Oil and petroleum products moved upriver to Albany for years to the former Cibro refinery, which went bankrupt in 1992 but continued to ship and store oil for several years afterward.

In September 1989, one of the upper Hudson's worst oil spills happened when more than 1,000 gallons of heating oil oozed 20 miles south from Albany. The leak came from a defective barge unloading at the Cibro terminal.

Responsibility for protecting the Hudson from oil spills — and for seeing it is cleaned up afterward — rests with the U.S. Coast Guard, which has agreements with the state DEC and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Albany and the upper Hudson are covered by the Coast Guard's overall Area Contingency Plan that focuses on the Port of New York and New Jersey, and extends up the Hudson to Albany. This plan was last redone in September 2011 and is set to be revisited in 2015.

"Our plan is not going to change because of crude shipments from Albany," said Cmdr. Linda Sturgis, chief of the prevention department for Coast Guard Sector New York. She said both Global and Buckeye are approved already by the Coast Guard to ship crude oil, and "changes in the amount that they are shipping would not be considered a change in how they operate."

The contingency plan for the Hudson does not specifically mention either Buckeye or Global, or provide contact information on which company officials ought to be contacted by the Coast Guard in the event of a spill. The plan also does not include any mention of the Albany Port District Commission, or Hendrick, who has been port manager since 2008.

Coast Guard spokesman Charles Rowe said the plan was not "meant to be an exhaustive list of all stakeholders ... (and) is written and designed in such a way that it can be applied anywhere... obviously including Albany."

The plan lists just nine "stakeholders" for the river — only DEC and the state Parks Environmental Management Bureau have a presence in the Capital Region, while the rest are located in the metro New York area or New Jersey.

DEC licenses oil tank farms in Albany totaling 135 million gallons for Global and Buckeye and does not see a need to review Coast Guard oil spill planning, prevention and response plans in advance of increased crude shipments into and from Albany, said DEC spokeswoman Emily DeSantis.

DEC has a written agreement on such issues with the Coast Guard.The 1995 agreement is "written broadly, and at this time, we do not believe the increased shipments in Albany warrant any revisions," she said.

Responding quickly to a spill is the best way to limit damage to the Hudson's sensitive shoreline, which includes the Indian Point nuclear power plant, state and local parks, marinas, drinking water intake plants, sewer treatment plants and environmentally valuable areas.

Accordingly, the Coast Guard plan recommends that a basic tool to deal with oil spills — a floating boom meant to contain oil within a certain area — be stored "at critical areas ... State and local parks along the waterfront should consider storing sufficient boom on site to protect their area and designate park rangers or local police and firemen to deploy it in the event of a pollution incident. Marinas and boat yards should be encouraged by their boat-owning customers to have boom on hand to protect their property in the event of an oil spill."

Rowe said the Coast Guard cannot require booms to be on hand, and thus does not know if any booms have been voluntarily obtained and are now in storage along the Hudson.

"I run the river all the time, and I see no repositories of booms there, other than at the oil terminals themselves," said John Lipscomb, who for the last decade has run a water quality inspection boat for the not-for-profit environmental group Hudson Riverkeeper. Terminals are legally required to have booms available.

Even if extra booms were stored at key sites, without trained people and boats to get them into the river quickly, "it wouldn't mean much," he said.

The Coast Guard plan also details areas along the river where "potential environmental and economic damage could be greatest" from an oil spill or other disaster — and likely would be useful places to have containment booms nearby prior to any spill.

However, the Coast Guard keeps this information private and declined to share it with a reporter. "This denies those who desire to purposely damage the environment a blueprint by which they may do so," Rowe said.

"What, is al-Qaeda going to suck up one of our marshes?" Lipscomb said. He said information on environmentally valuable parts of the Hudson has already been publicly compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.